He glanced back at her.  Had she known how bravely he restrained himself she might have made as much a hero of him as of the knight Amadis.  For he was wounded to the heart—­his brightest hopes were frustrated, and at the very instant he walked away from her he would have given his life to have held her for a moment in his arms,—­to have kissed her lips, and whispered to her the pretty, caressing love-nonsense which to warm and tender hearts is the sweetest language in the world.  And with all his restrained passion he was irritated with what, from a man’s point of view, he considered folly on her part,—­he felt that she despised his love and himself for no other reason than a mere romantic idea, bred of loneliness and too much reading of a literature alien to the customs and manners of the immediate time, and an uncomfortable premonition of fear for her future troubled his mind.

“Poor little girl!” he thought—­“She does not know the world!—­and when she does come to know it—­ah, my poor Innocent!—­I would rather she never knew!”

Meanwhile she, left to herself, was not without a certain feeling of regret.  She was not sure of her own mind—­and she had no control over her own fancies.  Every now and then a wave of conviction came over her that after all tender-hearted old Priscilla might be right—­that it would be best to marry Robin and help him to hold and keep Briar Farm as it had ever been kept and held since the days of the Sieur Amadis.  Perhaps, had she never heard the story of her actual condition, as told her by Farmer Jocelyn on the previous night, she might have consented to what seemed so easy and pleasant a lot in life; but now it seemed to her more than impossible.  She no longer had any link with the far-away ancestor who had served her so long as a sort of ideal—­she was a mere foundling without any name save the unbaptised appellation of Innocent.  And she regarded herself as a sort of castaway.

She went into the house soon after Robin had left her, and busied herself with sorting the linen and looking over what had to be mended.  “For when I go,” she said to herself, “they must find everything in order.”  She dined alone with Priscilla—­Robin sent word that he was too busy to come in.  She was a little piqued at this—­and almost cross when he sent the same message at tea-time, —­but she was proud in her way and would not go out to see if she could persuade him to leave his work for half-an-hour.  The sun was slowly declining when she suddenly put down her sewing, struck by a thought which had not previously occurred to her—­and ran fleetly across the garden to the orchard, where she found Robin lying on his back under the trees with closed eyes.  He opened them, hearing the light movement of her feet and the soft flutter of her gown—­but he did not rise.  She stopped—­looking at him.

“Were you asleep?”

He stretched his arms above his head, lazily.

“I believe I was!” he answered, smiling.